July 2015

May 24, 2010

Crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico and washing ashore in Louisiana
is exposing how ill-prepared the U.S. has been to respond to a major
offshore oil spill.

In the fight to limit environmental damage
from the month-old spill—which is on track to rival the 1989 Exxon
Valdez disaster in size—BP PLC executives,
government officials, and scientists are learning as they go, even
though the industry has been drilling in the Gulf for decades and has 77
rigs operating there, according to ODS-Petrodata, a research firm.

So we were woefully unready for disaster, even as the "drill here, drill now" chants echoed.

In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted.

May 23, 2010

Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither
should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis,
esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth--all real dangers.
I, too, deplore these afflications. But, as between these evils and the
aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the
heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold
phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic.

Walker Percy on his drink of choice. Duke won that football game behind Jack Alexander's 193 rushing yards; 1935 was a long time ago.

Republican Party leaders have escalated an unprecedented campaign
against one of their own congressional candidates, with N.C. GOP
chairman Tom Fetzer calling Tim D'Annunzio "unfit for public office at
any level."

..."What he could do to the party as our nominee is secondary in my view to
what he could do to the country if he got elected. If he got elected,
for crying out loud, that would be a disaster."

May 22, 2010

Media Myth Alert is a blog written by W. Joseph Campbell, author of the forthcoming book, "Getting It Wrong
Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism," focused on "stories about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and
often retold but which, under scrutiny, prove to be apocryphal or wildly
exaggerated."

The second point, which gets directly to why Rand Paul is suddenly flailing, is that the local Kentucky media--in particular the newspapers, and especially the flagship Louisville Courier-Journal--has been decimated by job cuts, as has happened across the country...candidates don't run the same kind of gauntlet they once did. They're not challenged by journalists.

You mean the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression might have actual consequences?

"By holding interest rates at zero, the government is basically
tricking the population into going long on just about every kind of
security except cash, at the price of almost certainly not getting an
adequate return for the risks they are running. People can't stand
earning 0% on their money, so the government is forcing everyone in the
investing public to speculate."

"We didn't get the value out of
this crisis that we should have," Mr. Klarman told the audience. "For
our parents or grandparents, it was awful to have had a Great
Depression. But it was in some ways helpful to carry a Depression
mentality throughout their later lives, because it meant they were
thrifty with their money and prudent in their investment decisions." He
added: "All we got out of this crisis was a Really Bad Couple of Weeks
mentality."

The company conceded Thursday what some scientists have been saying
for weeks: More oil is flowing from the leak than BP and the Coast Guard
had previously estimated.

"It's anger at the people who are supposed to be driving the ship
don't have any idea what's going on," said E.J. Boles, 55, a musician
from Big Pine Key, Fla. "Why wouldn't they have any contingency plan?"...

..."Everything in that marsh is dead as we speak," Plaquemines Parish
President Billy Nungesser said.

The U.S. Senate, bringing Congress to
the brink of passing the most comprehensive regulation of the
financial industry since the Great Depression, approved a bill
that imposes restrictions on proprietary trading by banks and
creates a consumer protection agency designed to prevent lending
abuses that triggered the housing collapse and the worst
unemployment in almost three decades.

Historians will probably conclude that the package of reforms was
surprisingly modest given the depth and severity of the 2008-09
financial crisis. A harsher historical judgment might find that the
political and economic power wielded by the financial industry in the
late 20th and early 21st centuries was so extensive that it could
weather a near total collapse of the system without having to yield its
power or privilege.

Passage of the bill would be a signature achievement for the White
House, nearly on par with the recently enacted health care law...Congressional Republican leaders, adopting an election-year strategy
of opposing initiatives supported by the Obama administration, voiced
loud criticism of the legislation while trying to insist that they still
wanted tougher policing of Wall Street.

For officials in several EU capitals, the most disturbing aspect of
the dispute is that it points to Germany’s willingness to act on its own
in the financial crisis, albeit in what it conceives to be the general
European interest.

It also underlines the difficulties that
Germany and France have encountered in trying to forge common answers to
the sovereign debt emergency.

May 19, 2010

1) the largest category of delinquent loans are fixed rate prime loans,
and 2) this is not just a "sand state" problem. Brinkmann argued the
foreclosure crisis is now being driven by economic problems as opposed
to the bursting of the housing price bubble - and this is showing up in
prime loans and all states.

I'm sure he meant "fixed rate prime loans given to poor people after CRA forced Wall Street to go a little crazy," but it's alarming nonetheless.

There may be a forest-for-the-trees aspect to that analysis, but it does raise an interesting question about the state of the GOP, which may be more threatened than the Democrats by the tea partiers, and which, come to think of it, has earned that TPM headline several times in the past few years.

Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of
groups like AIPAC and the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course,
they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist
leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even
them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to
appalled.

May 18, 2010

In the summer of 1984 my friend Cunningham and I were in Munich when this huge hailstorm blew in and pelted the city with monster ice-balls for a long time, busting up cars and shredding awnings and greatly impressing two guys from Greensboro, who walked away thinking, Boy, they sure do have interesting weather here in Germany.

Lisa Scheer took the pic below recently on East Market Street. Her show about Mill Village life, which opened last year at the Greensboro Historical Museum, is now on view at the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro, along with material gathered by UNCG prof Benjamin Filene and his students; an opening reception is planned for Thurs 5/27 at 5:30 PM; more of her work is featured here.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and by extension the U.S. taxpayer,
owns more than 250 collateralized debt obligations that were purchased
by small institutions that later failed. Although the bonds have a book
value of more than $400 million, they are a headache for the agency as
it grapples with the toxic assets flowing from many banks around the
country.

Without adequately planning for trouble, the oil business has focused on
developing experimental equipment and techniques to drill in ever
deeper waters, according to a Wall Street Journal examination of
previous deepwater accidents. As drillers pushed the boundaries,
regulators didn't always mandate preparation for disaster recovery or
perform independent monitoring.

I guess past successes like the Exxon Valdez just gave the industry a false sense of confidence.

"We all believe in something," says Mayor Bill Knight, explaining his decision to impose prayer at the City Council meetings.

But not everyone believes in something that involves prayer, and not everyone who prays believes in public prayer at government meetings.

Danny Thompson says he already uses the Council's moment of silence according to his own beliefs and preferences, and that he prays whenever he has the opportunity, so clearly the lack of a public prayer is not constraining him, or anyone else who wishes to pray before or during a meeting.

May 17, 2010

Chris Oynes, who oversaw oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico for
12 years before being promoted in 2007 to associate director for
offshore energy and minerals management, informed colleagues in an
e-mail that he will step down. He has come under fire from former MMS
officials for being too close to the industry he regulated.

Interesting to see if he finds work as a lobbyist, or some other revolving-door gig.

Fortunately there are places the hot blonde underclass can still find work.

Swarthy women in tiaras may not be as serious a problem as too many Jews on the Supreme Court, but they're insult to injury at time when "WASPs are being priced out of their waterfront estates and displaced on
their nonprofit boards by Jewish, Catholic and other non-Protestant
entrepreneurs."

[T]he serial contamination of balance sheets [...] is hitting the reality of
scarcity.

Industrial countries are running out of balance sheets that can be
levered safely in order to minimize the disruptive impact of past
excesses. This lies behind the recent (warranted) concerns about the
explosion of debt, and the related surge in sovereign risk measures.